Trying to keep up with the zeitgeist

The release of Jennifer’s Body started a discussion of how the audience for horror movies is largel female nowadays (with 65% of the audience for some horror movies being women) but after terrible marketingJennifer’s Body bombed. However, after seeing Penn Badgley discuss his role on The Stepfather, I wonder if horror’s female fanbase is starting to affect the genre.

Bagley discussed having to get in shape for the movie and mentioned that he probably spends half the movie shirtless. From what I’ve seen, he spends the same amount of time shirtless in the ads for The Stepfather, as well (which, admittedly, has gotten me to watch ads for The Stepfather quite a bit).

Horror movies have already seen an influx of hotties from TV shows with young and female fanbases — think Chad Michael Murray and Jared Padalecki in House of Wax or Jensen Ackles in My Bloody Valentine — but this is the first time I’ve seen a half-naked CW stud presented so often (though Murray’s shirtless torso was fairly prominent in ads for House of Wax, just not this prominent) as a reason to see a horror movie.

And while the producers gave an infuriating rationale for why one of the characters was changed from female to male in remaking The Stepfather, I’m wondering if the real motivation was that it would make it easier to add a frequently-shirtless hunk into the movie that way.

If this is where the horror genre is headed, it might be a sign of how the common wisdom of Hollywood marketing (where, it was presumed, all you had to do to get a woman’s entertainment dollar is to convince her man he was interested) may finally be changing.